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Augmentative Communication and Early Intervention Myths and Realities MaryAnn Romski, PhD, CCC-SLP; Rose A. Sevcik, PhD The use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) services and supports with infants and young children has been limited, owing to a number of myths about the appropriateness of AAC use with this population. This article will provide an overview of some of the myths that have hampered the inclusion of AAC into early intervention service delivery and refutes them. It will then examine some of the realities that must be considered when delivering AAC services and supports to young children

The results of this research add to the evidence regarding the effectiveness of using AAC with people with an ASD (Mirenda, 2001; Schlosser & Blischak, 2001), and adds to the knowledge of why AAC systems are potentially beneficial for children with autism, (The National Standards Report). Effective teaching of motor plans, using the LAMP theory, can be seen to allow for increased storage and retention of symbolic information, resulting with more automatic communication over time, and reducing the cognitive demands associated with analysing and choosing from different symbol sets, as described in the LAMP Manuals (Halloran and Emerson, 2006: Halloran and Halloran, 2012).

Research suggests changing the icons size and location decreases the speed and accuracy of a person learning to use a speech generating device.

"The identification of a child with dyslexia is a difficult process, but there are ways that parents and teachers can learn more about the reading difficulty and support the child's learning."

"Chris Klein is a voice to those that have none and helping hand to those with disabilities, even though he was born with cerebral palsy and uses augmentative communication to help him interact with the rest of the world. Over the past four years, Chris has been working closely with people that use AAC. He has recently been elected president of USSAAC (United States Society of Augmentative Alternative Communication). He has also formed an organization called BeCOME AAC. It stands for Building Connections with Others through Mentoring and Education about AAC. Chris is a graduate of Hope College and has studied at Western Theological Seminary. He currently lives in Grand Rapids with his wife Dawn."

Teach a student to use a communication device to generate language by using the communication device as a model.

Run! Run! Run for your lives! Episode #42 is up for your listening pleasure! Episode #42 features a visit to Count Edula's mansion where he asks about some tools he can use to help organize his "hypothetical" zombie army. Chris's suggestions just so happen to be useful tools to help students as well.

Audio descriptions of Google Earth, Mystudio/Quizrevolution, and shorttext.com

Description: This includes practice tests (in practice mode or quiz mode) for Kindergarten English, 5th Grade Reading, 3rd Grade History, 4th Grade Virginia History, 5th Grade US History, 4th Grade Math, 5th Grade Math, 7th Grade Math, Kindergarten Computer Technology, 5th Grade Computer Technology, and 8th Grade Computer Technology.

Free version of Words with Friends using IPA (Sound symbols for therapy)

"Plastimake is an easy-to-use plastic that you can shape with your hands. Make strong plastic items in minutes, no special tools required. Perfect for DIY projects, repairs, costumes, crafts, prototypes and more."

Use this stuff to make tangible materials with your hands!

Use digital graphic organizers like SpiderScribe.net so students can take advantage of all the benefits of writing digitally including spell check, word prediction, adding pictures, text to speech, adding maps, sharing their work to the world and more!

This video demonstrates how to use Read&Write for Google Chrome to work with webpages in the Chrome browser, using supports like text to speech, word prediction, talking and picture dictionaries, study skills highlighters and more.

" Over 1,000 K-6 math activities mapped to your curriculum!"

"Money is a useful medium of exchange that allows people to trade goods and services with a minimum of inconvenience. Governments around the world each issue their own money in the form of currency, usually banknotes and coins. Each world currency features a unique design and history and you can often learn much about a nation by learning about its currency. As people learn about the money used in other countries, the world gets smaller and greater understanding between citizens of different nations often develops."

In this blog post by a famous AAC clinician named Gail Van Tatenhove she tells the story of Velma, an employee at an adult facility who witnessed Gail talking with an AAC user by modeling on the device. Velma was inspired to become "America's Next Top Modeler" with Gail acting as her coach. In the article, Gail outlines some initial scripts she gave to Velma to use when chatting with the AAC user. These scripts were necessary because Velma couldn't be expected to know where every word was she might ever need to say. The scripts took the pressure off! Velma only needed to find these few words. Guess what happened? In time, Velma learned where all of these words were so she didn't need to use the scripts at all.